Archive

So here we are, at the tail end of Roll Initiative’s first sequence. We’ve covered pretty much all of the basics of Pathfinder from a player’s point of view, from building a character on up through how a battle unfolds in the game. Before moving on to the next phase of the series, where we’ll tackle GMing, let’s take a quick look back at what we’ve covered so far.

RollInitiative #3.5: TheCharacterSheet - This interlude served as a fine tuning on the previous post, in which we used one of our own player character sheets as an example of what to look for and how to put your character sheet together.

RollInitiative #4: StayinginCharacter - The tricky art of role-playing your character can be difficult to get a handle on at first. Here, we shared a few of our tips for making it a little simpler.

RollInitiative #5: GameFlow - So how does the game actually go, anyway? We illustrated a typical example of Pathfinder in action, along with the various phases of gameplay, here.

RollInitiative #6: Combat! - Of course, combat is by far the most complicated aspect of the game, and in this post, we went over how a round of fighting in the game might go.

And what have we learned? Tabletop roleplaying games can be complicated. Pathfinder is a big system with tons and tons and tons of options- feats, equipment, archetypes, all kinds of stuff- and it’s not the easiest game in the world to learn overnight. But all those options also mean practically endless customization, which also means that this is a game that can last you a long, long time- especially as you play multiple characters across several campaigns, you start to realize that the enormous amount of options Paizo and the various third-party contributors to the system have provided means that one could stick with Pathfinder exclusively and never exhaust all the different types of characters and situations that might come up.

That’s really the beauty of this particular form of gaming, regardless of the rule system you’re playing- Pathfinder, D&D, Dungeon World, Savage Worlds- in the theater of the mind, there are no limits to what characters you can create, what adventures they might run into.